Date: Thu, 9 Feb 95 11:11:18 CST
From: Robert Dailey
February 9, 1995
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Notre Dame Gay Group to Hold First Public Meeting
Following University's Move to Bar Further Activities
NOTRE DAME, IN -- The gay and lesbian group recently barred from holding
further meetings in campus facilities at the University of Notre Dame will
gather this evening for its first public meeting at the university's
student center. The group, Gays and Lesbians of Notre Dame and St. Mary's
College (GLND/SMC) will hold an open meeting tonight (Thursday) at 7:30 PM
in the common area of Notre Dame's LaFortune Student Center. The
group has extended an invitation to the entire university community to
attend and show its support.
The group was informed by university administrators on January 23
that it would no longer be allowed to use the room in the University
Counseling Center where it was housed for nearly nine years.
Commented GLND/SMC co-chair John Blandford, "The student center is
space we are all entitled to use as students, and it is important that we
continue to maintain a strong presence here at Notre Dame. Despite the
university's attempts to wish us away, lesbians and gay men are very much a
part of the Notre Dame family. The meeting will allow us to re-assert the
importance of our presence and enable the rest of the community to come out
and show the true support that is out there. People need to know that the
real Notre Dame is in its people and not in the insensitive decisions of a
few administrators."
The meeting will be held in the common area just outside the
student center's "Tom Dooley Room." Dooley, an alumnus of Notre Dame and
favorite son, was a naval officer and medical missionary is Southeast Asia
during the late 1950's. It was recently revealed that Dooley had received
a dishonorable discharge from the navy in 1956 because he was a homosexual.
The cause of Dooley's separation from the navy was described in the
late Randy Shilts' _Conduct_Unbecoming_, a 1993 work on gays and lesbians in
the military. In addition to the room in the student center, Dooley is
honored with a statue on Notre Dame's campus. Said Co-Chair Kelly Smith,
"It seems especially ironic that the university's action to bar us from
using campus facilities even keeps us locked out of the 'Tom Dooley Room.'"
The group intends to meet outside the locked doors of the room and invoke
Dooley's memory and his prominence in the history of the university.
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+ \\ E-Mail: John.M.Blandford.2@nd.edu
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// \\ Phone: 219.232.6332 +
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--
Robert F. Dailey St. Edward's University, #892
rdailey@acad.stedwards.edu 3001 S. Congress Ave.
(512) 448-8704 (voice) Austin, TX 78704-6489
(512) 448-8492 (fax) U.S.A.